Sign in

The Truth in “King of Bain”

The reviews for “King of Bain: When Mitt Romney Came to Town,” a twenty-seven-minute campaign documentary distributed online by a Super PAC that supports Newt Gingrich, have not been kind. “Highly misleading” and “manipulative,” declared the Washington Post. “Misleading and exaggerated,” said the Times. On Monday, in South Carolina, the film’s subject, Romney, called it “probably the biggest hoax since Bigfoot.”

The criticisms are grounded in the belief that political advertising should be factually accurate and presented in a balanced context. That would surely be desirable, and it is useful for journalists to try to hold politicians accountable for their lies. Yet to dismiss “King of Bain” because it selects facts, distorts history, and tugs unrelentingly on the viewer’s emotions would be to overlook other interesting aspects of the film. “King of Bain” is to the Super PAC era of political distortion what “Apocalypse Now” was to Hollywood’s era of the auteur director: an apotheosis of inspired excess, and a marker of the times we inhabit.

The purpose of “King of Bain” is to portray Romney as a heartless, tone-deaf destroyer of jobs who is indifferent to the human cost of the recent economic upheaval in heartland American communities. It does this through four case studies of mid-sized companies taken over between the early nineties and 2003 by Bain Capital, the private-equity firm Romney ran until he left, in 1999, to supervise the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.

A number of Republicans have denounced the film as an attack on free enterprise and a reckless act of revenge on Gingrich’s part. (Technically, the Super PAC that released the film, Winning Our Future, isn’t affiliated with Gingrich, but some of its key staffers are old Gingrich hands.) The prevailing assumption is that Winning Our Future decided to buy and distribute the film, despite its incendiary qualities, because Gingrich was furious about ads made about him by a Super PAC that supports Romney, particularly a wave of ads that excavated and excoriated Gingrich’s past. (“More baggage than the airlines.”) They were shown relentlessly in the weeks leading up to Iowa caucuses; Gingrich fell from a leading position in opinion polls to finish fourth.

“King of Bain” employs many techniques to achieve its effects: ominous time-lapse photography, an omniscient-sounding narrator, clips of Romney at a campaign rally declaring that “corporations are people” while being heckled and laughed at, and the repeated use of a photograph of Romney apparently having his shoes shined on airport tarmac beside what appears to be a private jet. In fact, the photo shows a Transportation Security Agency officer using a wand to check Romney’s shoes, which the film makes no effort to clarify.

Yet the film’s power, like that of Michael Moore’s documentaries, resides mainly in the voices of ordinary Americans speaking about their travails. Most of the film features seemingly straightforward interviews with people who lost their jobs, lost their health insurance, lost their home, skipped meals to feed their children, or moved involuntarily in search of new work. It borrows in tone from “Up in the Air,” a film about a corporate-layoff specialist, played by George Clooney, that cast non-actors who had actually been fired as Clooney’s victims.

According to the filmmakers, some of the interview subjects in “King of Bain” were paid with gift cards worth about one hundred dollars each to participate, and some of them have been quoted in the Post as saying that they did not understand the film’s purpose and that their stories were taken out of context. Still, whether or not Bain or Romney can be held responsible for their suffering, there is no question about the underlying authenticity of their narratives, and that is what comes through on the screen. To watch the film is to be carried briefly into marriages and families where people who thought they understood the rules of the economy were disabused, traumatically, of their beliefs.

The film’s heavy-handedness gets in its way, to be sure, but there is one demagogic coup de grace: excerpts from a promotional video Romney made while running the Olympics, in which he speaks in earnest classroom French. “Bonjour! Je m’appelle Mitt Romney!” The film’s last words, a coda that follows a heartbreaking montage of interviews with people who are recalling, sometimes tearfully, the depths of their economic insecurities, are offered by Romney: “Une grande fête mondiale! À bientôt!”

The making of “King of Bain” reflects on two big changes in the American system of choosing presidents: Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision that opened the door to unlimited contributions to Super PACs; and the Internet, which has made documentaries much cheaper to make and easier to distribute to large audiences than ever before.

According to the Times, the film was conceived after Barry Bennett, a former consultant to a Super PAC that backs Governor Rick Perry of Texas, purchased files of opposition research on Romney that had been assembled during Romney’s unsuccessful 2008 Presidential campaign. Bennett financed the film on spec, figuring that eventually one of Romney’s Republican primary rivals would purchase it from him.

Bennett hired Jason Killian Meath to direct the film. Meath maintains a Web site that provides a rich account of his career. He says that he started making movies in the basement of his family home around 1980, when he was twelve years old. After studying film at Columbia University, he joined the Republican National Committee.

“I’ve done this now for a couple of decades, at least, making political ads,” Meath told me this week. Negative ads might be distasteful and unpopular, he said, but they work. “When you sit anybody down in a room and you ask them whether they like negative ads, well, I’ve never met anybody who says they like a negative ad. But when you show them some negative ads, and you ask their opinion…if the ads are effective and making an argument, those opinions shift. While no one likes a negative ad, they are effective.”

Meath said that he was “definitely Republican, conservative. I’ve worked for Haley Barbour, Mark McKinnon, Karl Rove. I’ve passed through their transoms one way or another throughout the years….As far as this film is concerned, you find yourself in this strange predicament where you’re against other Republicans, but you all want to win, and you want your perspective heard.” He added, “It’s really just the business that we’re in.” Meath did some ad work for Romney’s campaign in 2008.

Meath said that he did not feel guilty about making the film, even though it might strengthen President Obama’s likely general-election campaign against Romney, because he believed that he was doing the Republican Party a service by forcing the Party’s strategists to come to terms with footage, photographs, themes, and stories that liberal Super PACs would surely use later. “All I did was steal a nuclear weapon from David Axelrod, brought it over to our side, dissected it, and dismantled it,” he said.

The film is dangerous mainly because it conveys the sense of powerlessness that is truly felt by many Americans during this highly unusual election year. At one point, two sisters or friends—it is not clear which—sit on a couch and talk back and forth about the suffering that took place in Marion, Indiana, when Bain bought a paper company there and shifted its local factory elsewhere. One of the women says cautiously but cheekily that Mitt Romney is not really a supporter of small businesses. Her companion reprimands her: “You’re going to be on the hit list—you know that?”

“He’s a money man,” another Marion resident declares of Romney. “And he’s going to look out for the money people.”

The money people made this film during a cynical, distorted contest for supremacy among themselves. It is not journalism, but it is not the worst piece of demagoguery that we are likely to endure before November, either, about Romney or Obama. Like most political speech and argument in the Super PAC era, “King of Bain” is a narrative of noise and emotional manipulation, intercut with jagged shards of truth.

Steve Coll, a staff writer, is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and reports on issues of intelligence and national security in the United States and abroad.